New chip to thwart DVD piracy is a long way off and faces considerable challenges

News of another anti-piracy measure is making the rounds, and we check in and …

Will RFID chips be coming to DVDs? Ritek Corporation, the lead company behind a new drive to use RFID chips to authenticate optical media, would like to say 'yes.' The reality is that any such technology has likely missed the boat for the upcoming generation of HD optical media. It does give us a glimpse of future potential weapons in the war against piracy.

Last week U-Tech, a subsidiary of Ritek, announced the development of what it termed the world's first "Chip-on-Disk" (COD) system to identify and authenticate optical disc contents. Alongside its partners RiRF Technologies and IPICO, U-Tech claimed that by using RFID technology, companies could essentially trace the "history" of a disc, from its youthful days at the disc factory to its later days in your DVD collection. Using this information, it would be possible for properly equipped playback devices to identify pirated materials and refuse to play them.

How does this differ from any other anti-copy scheme? Ritek hopes that it would eventually be possible for playback devices to read the chip and then look at the content on a disc and determine if they are pirated, the company said. Because the COD information is disc-specific, movies could be printed in lots that are authorized for specific discs.

Ritek has not explicitly laid out their approach, but having examined their press materials, it appears as though a kind of matching system is envisioned where studios could theoretically embed destination information in a movie (e.g., a disc unique identifier) that would then need to match the information on the COD. If a discs movie and its RFID data don't match, there's a problem.

"I've envisioned using RFID to improve product visibility and enhance security in the optical disc industry for some time," said Chairman Yeh, Ritek's founder. "Launching the COD system has made this dream a reality and holds the potential to protect the intellectual property of music companies, film studios, gaming and software developers worldwide," he added.

The technology is promising on two levels. Because it is based on RFID, it would be possible to scan hundreds of DVD boxes at a time, which could be useful for large retailers and warehouse operators. As a supply-chain tool to weed out pirated materials, this COD technology has much promise. Its backers, however, are more interested in seeing this approach brought to the home, where COD could be used to prevent the playback of pirated materials. This latter application faces seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Day late and a DRM short?

According to U-Tech, its first scheduled full pilot program will focus on "a logistics and supply chain anti-piracy project" that will involve several major movie industry players. After this pilot, another test will be conducted with DVD player manufacturers "to prove the concept of offline authentication during end-use." In other words, not only is there no installed base to support COD as of yet, there have been no significant trials, either. Reports that talk about this technology as if it's coming any day now have jumped the gun.

Furthermore, DVD is more than a decade old, and while companies experimenting with downloadable media sales are willing to experiment with watermarks to try and prevent unauthorized copying, this is a far cry from selling discs at retail with features that are not supported by the DVD standard. More importantly, because these features would require a DVD player to be able to recognize and communicate with the COD, there's no installed base to support this system at the playback level. If you put a COD-based disc in an existing DVD player, the disc will play back regardless of the RFID component. For the system to work fully, there has to be end-to-end support.

The likelihood of ever seeing this technology in today's ubiquitous DVD format or even tomorrow's HD DVD or Blu-ray discs is therefore slim to none. With DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray players all shipping today without support for COD, the best the system can hope for is spotty support in future players. Without near complete coverage, the system will be ineffective on the consumer end, which means that it shows no promise for DVD. That ship has sailed, circumnavigated the globe several times, and is currently filming a Girls Gone Wild installment.

HD DVD and Blu-ray could eventually support COD, but the clock is ticking. Both new optical disc formats already share an anti-copying system known as AACS, and Blu-ray has additional watermarking technologies aimed precisely at stopping the mass duplication of discs. If COD makes it through its pilot phases successfully, studios may hop on board. There is still basic proof-of-concept work to be done in the meantime, and even if it proves successful, the studios could balk at the royalties.

If today's date was 2004 instead of 2006, we'd wondering about this technology showing up in consumer players. Given the current state of affairs, we'd put our money on this technology staying relegated to the warehouse, which is probably the best place for RFID anyway.

Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher